About the Book
Award Finalist: 2017 Best Book Awards, Fiction: Short Story
Sponsored by AmericanBookFest
When you step off the train in Cadillac, Oklahoma, you'll wade through currents of hilarity and romance where the sheriff is in love with the wife of a prominent lawyer, and the banker's widow and a Las Vegas sex worker team up to beautify Cadillac. Not until a young female reporter cracks open the self-satisfied surface of the town is the folly, anger, and pain revealed. The resentments of tree-huggers, storeowners, and the town fathers ignite over a proposal to create a New England-style town green in this water-starved former Dust Bowl town.
Citizens who don't care about town politics, deal with domestic abuse, religious rivalry and stale marriages. The sheriff, Jake Hale, seeks help from a retired lawyer, Sloane Willard, in an effort to save the life of a teenage girl accused of murdering the father who raped her.
The town's guiding forces of rule following, religion, and guns unite as a praying mass of church-goers overwhelm Jake's attempt to manage an out-of-control hostage situation at Cadillac's Youth Detention Center.
Before you get back on the train, you will have grown to love these people and their thirst for love, beauty, water and justice.
About the Author:
LOUISE FARMER SMITH, descendent of dugout-dwellers and chip-gatherers, draws from wells deep in Oklahoma's past as well as from high rises in New York and back rooms on Capitol Hill. Potomac Review, Antietam Review and Glimmer Train have all awarded Smith. Crosstimbers nominated Voice of Experience, a story in Cadillac, Oklahoma, for a 2014 Pushcart Prize. Bellevue Literary Review nominated, "Return to Lincoln," a story in her novel, One Hundred Years of Marriage, for a 2005 Pushcart Prize.
Smith's work has been supported by The Ragdale Foundation and by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She was a 2005 Bread Loaf fellow. Most recently Smith was short listed for the Rubery Book Award, UK.
Smith grew up in Norman, Oklahoma, graduated from Norman High, received a BA in Letters from Oklahoma University and two masters degrees from Yale and Goddard. She has worked as a high school and college English teacher, trained as a family therapist, and served on a U.S. Congressman's staff. She lives on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
Smith is the author of the novel, One Hundred Years of Marriage, published by Upper Hand Press in 2014 and, released in its second, expanded edition in 2016.
In 2017, Upper Hand Press will publish Smith's The Woman Without a Voice, a memoir of her family's pioneering into Oklahoma Territory at the end of the 19th Century. Based on family documents and photographs the focus is on the story of the women in the family who had no choice but to follow their husbands into a treeless wilderness.
